Application load balancers may be integrated into a network, such as a fabric network, using a wide variety of deployment modes. These deployment modes include one-arm routed modes, two-arm routed modes, inline routed modes, inline bridged modes, and others. Regardless of the application load balancer deployment method, an important property of the resulting deployment is the ability to retain end-user transparency at the application server nodes. The visibility is important for certain applications, such as financial and banking applications, which are mandated to retain traces and logs of every client transaction for compliance purposes.
Computer networking has evolved to take advantage of control-plane based end-host reachability information, which allows for large scale, robust and highly available networks. Such networks may be built using logical or virtual overlay technologies and encapsulation technologies, such as FabricPath or Virtual Extensible Local Area Networks (VXLAN). Traditional methods for steering data traffic in these newer fabric network technologies may not be easily scalable or techniques for packet steering may limit some of the benefits of newer control-plane based fabric networks. This is especially true in the presence of a distributed Internet Protocol (IP) anycast gateway where the leaf or Top of Rack (ToR) switches host the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Layer 3 gateway for all the workloads below them.